Nokia New Phone Concept & dyeing one’s whiskers green

A daily digest I received from a design mailgroup highly praised a new phone concept that's recently been developed by the mobile giant Nokia. The introductory post went into further detail to prove how breakthrough the concept was: "works with solar energy, calculates the hazardous substances on the apple you're going to eat, never gets dirty and cleans the dirt around it, the Nokia of the future..."

"Calculates the hazardous substances on the apple you're going to eat"? With all due respect to the hard work being put into nanotechnology and similar scientific developments, I find it impossible not to stand aghast at the way they're being used by the industry. It reveals a good deal about the pathetic situation our civilization— and, in particular, the design profession — is in.

I'm sure that at some point any designer has been told they're problem solvers. How about a different perception of this notion? In the light of this Nokia example, it's time to face the fact that what we do is to create solutions to create further problems. Rachel Carson's inspirational text Silent Spring tells us about Lewis Carroll's metaphor for such an attitude:

This system, however—deliberately poisoning our food, then policing the result—is too reminiscent of Lewis Carroll’s White Knight who thought of ‘a plan to dye one’s whiskers green, and always use so large a fan that they could not be seen’. The ultimate answer is to use less toxic chemicals so that the public hazard from their misuse is greatly reduced.

It's already time we start taking a holistic approach to the problems our civilization has caused. Wouldn't it be a more "breakthrough concept" if, for example, Nokia started a fund to prevent pollution or use of chemicals in agriculture, etc.

Click here to watch the introductory video for Morph—Nokia's New Phone Concept.

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May Day—The Wall Reveals All

"Turkey welcomes you". That's how the slogan for the country's tourism campaign goes. Whether with open arms, or nightsticks and tear gas might vary depending on what part of the year the visit takes place. And May 1st surely falls in to the latter category.

On my way back from some long time spent abroad, my native Turkey had given me "its warmest welcome" on that very day. While it seemed like another Labor Day pitched battle for us natives, it may have not been so for the unfortunate tourists who were exposed to the fury of the police. "Isn't the cold war over?" they might have been asking. Not on this land, folks.

In here, the cold war goes on everyday, between any two parties: Secular-Islamist, Sunni-Alevi, Turk-Kurd, Istanbulite-Anatolian, Fenerbahce-Galatasaray, rapper-punk, so on and so forth. There's an ongoing tension — on the bus, in the streets — that's waiting to get physical any moment. But only very few of these positions can face hostility from any layer of the society. And among those positions, the most suppressed and marginalized of all, is the left and its values (special thanks go to the 1980 coup).

It was during that same 80s oppressive atmosphere when words like devrim (revolution), örgüt (organization) and eylem (action) have been forced out from Turkish people's everyday vocabulary. They went on to live in the children's names, today serving as a litmus test for whose parents were revolutionaries back in the day. Today, the resistance those words still have to endure is by itself a substantial proof of the ongoing "cold war".

This May 2nd 2008 photo taken on Istiklal Caddesi — one of the "battlefields" of May 1st — leads one to similar analyses. The wall is of a famous electronics' store, and written on it, is the word devrim (revolution), possibly a souvenir from the previous day's incidents. As seen in the photo, the store's answer to this "marginalized" word is a sticker that strikes back with three weapons: Football — opium of the masses, the national flag, and the corporate logo. What a trio.

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Keep Britain Tidy

I truly adore reading leftover material, and my latest experience was even more pleasurable for being about green issues. Taking a look at an abandoned April 12th issue of The Times, I learned about Bill Bryson’s launch of a three year campaign against street littering. Take a look at this article to see how serious his commitment to “Keep Britain Tidy” is.

“London is now the dirtiest city in Europe as well as the costliest.” Now, that is some paradox.

Turning over the pages, I noticed that at least three of them were dedicated to green issues. One was about the paper giving away free Vivienne Westwood green bags, but the coupon was already torn, and I realized that I had missed out. After all, this is exactly what I love about reading leftovers, seeing how other people have interacted with such material gives you a peak through this little window into their lives.

This issue also had some impressive pictures from around the UK, showing chunks of litter left outdoors, and these were enough to make the point. I could not go without publishing a photo of my neighbour’s front yard here along with this post. So if you’re also concerned about this particular issue, join in on the squeal.

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Back to the future: Lessons from half a century ago, for brighter prospects

I have been developing a special interest in looking into the WWII and post-WWII years alongside a general investigation into green issues. I believe there’s a lot to learn from that period of history, which was more or less when our present economical order was established. (I have previously written about Utility Furniture, a British government scheme carried out during and recently after the Second World War.) Two books I have recently read—The Waste Makers by Vance Packard (1959), and The Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962)—made me rethink what we today have no problem to settle with.

When I first came to London, I was quite amazed at what I saw in the capital’s parks. I was able to walk around with the company of squirrels and foxes, sharing the greens with them. Thinking of thousands of cats and dogs wandering around in cities in my native Turkey, this was quite a paradigm shift in terms of what a metropolis can accommodate as street animals. Reading Silent Spring further startled me, when I learned about how normal it was to have many other animals as part of urban life in the sixties. This book was written when this natural harmony all started to fall apart, it includes some of the first resistance attempts against cruel industrialization:

The ‘control of nature’ is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man. The concepts and practices of applied entomology for the most part date from that Stone Age of science. It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them against the earth.

If a visit to the electronics store today still gets you all mixed up, welcome to the club. Nowadays, it requires a good deal of effort to keep up with the pace of “development” in consumer goods. Nevertheless, one has to admit that no matter how amazed we might get at these new products, we have adapted so that we now accept that, for instance, an appliance we buy today will be out-dated in 6-12 months. But The Waste Makers was written at a time when concepts like “the consumerist society” and “planned obsolescence” were just introduced and still subject to debate. Therefore, like Carson, Packard finds things, which we are nowadays dull about, very difficult to understand:

How can the modern consumer choose plywood furniture intelligently—in the absence of a wood-labelling law—when wood labelled ‘driftwood walnut’ or ‘silver oak’ contains neither walnut not oak?

These two books belong to a time when people did not settle with the life the “common” understanding of economic growth and development had to offer them. It is a pity that nowadays that understanding is more or less the same, but the majority of people are okay to settle with it.

One question comes up after reminiscence: Did it, and does it still, have to be this way?

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